[s2k1]

The following is an explanation of my journey into Pontiacs and 64 GTOs, and the car i'm working on now.......

My dad is a car guy, so I grew up around cars and parts. In about 1985, my dad bought his dream car, a 69 Camaro RS Convertible. This was a project car. Shortly after the Camaro purchase, he picked up a 69 Firebird carcass. This was to be a parts car for the Camaro. He paid a whopping $20 for the Firebird! The Bird was a manual trans Sprint car, with no engine and trans. As I grew up, I decided I liked the Firebird and wanted to put it together. We built a 400 with #16 heads, Ram Air IV cam, 3 tube headers, Flowmaster 2.5" exhaust with cross flow muffler, and put a Muncie M-20 behind it with a Hurst Competition Plus shifter. It had an open carrier 3.55 rear gear. I drove this car to high school in the early 90s. I was fortunate to be able to drag race it at Carlsbad Raceway and also street raced it. My best at Carlsbad was a 13.75 @ 106 mph. It always worked better on the street than the drags and I had some fun with it! Unfortunately the car was hit hard in the driver door and quarter panel in 92 and it was totalled.With the insurance money, I bought a 64 GTO project car. I've had the 64 for 20 years this year and have never driven it. Time to do something about it!!! More about that in a minute.

I ended up replacing the 69 with a 68 Firebird and swapped the drivetrain over since I bought the wrecked 69 back from insurance. It was through street racing the 68 that I met Jim Wangers. Jim's Pontee Carlo was a 12 second car off the bottle then and 11 seconds on the juice. Pretty sure Pontee had a 440 Pontiac at that time. Jim and his crew were also running an 86 IROC Camaro on juice at the time. When I graduated HS, I went off to MMI and then on to a 11 year career at Honda in the Motorcycle Division. When I moved to Torrance CA for my job with Honda, Mr Wangers introduced me to Heinrich Gerhardt. I'm sure many of you will know Heinrich's 66 GTO of Car Craft fame. Heinrich showed me how to use B Body spindles, Cadillac Seville rear disc brakes, and all kinds of tricks for the time. Heinrich was building his Carbon Fiber EFI intake at this time. The Firebird was my daily driver at this time. Sometime during those years, the 400 spun a bearing, I ran it with the original 2 barrel 350 engine, a 65 389 engine, and then one day pulling out of a gas station I broke 1st gear in the Muncie. I am also into offroad vehicles and this consumed more and more of my life, and pretty soon the Firebird was parked and neglected. The 64 was also parked, still.